


Blind Spot

by Kendrene



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blind Character, Blind Kara Danvers, Blindness, Body Horror, F/F, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug, Lena Luthor Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:20:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21833575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrene/pseuds/Kendrene
Summary: Kara loses her sight, her hope, herself.This is the story of her recovery.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 19
Kudos: 229





	Blind Spot

**Author's Note:**

> I'm slowly going blind. 
> 
> I've known it'd happen at some point for the entirety of my life, but I'm now seeing the effects first-hand. Maybe it'll be another couple of years, maybe it'll be sooner, but I figured it was time to put on paper my fears and my feelings on the matter. I've been blind before - repeatedly, after eye surgery - and I know what it's like. However, this portrayal is not a universal experience and you should not take it as one.
> 
> I'm writing this story because it may bring hope to someone else in my position, but be aware that the journey to recovery is dark. 
> 
> Please heed the tags.
> 
> \- Dren

> **Blind spot** : ( _noun_ ) ANATOMY - the point of entry of the optic nerve on the retina, insensitive to light.

* * *

Kara goes blind on a Wednesday.

It's not really important, the fact that it's Wednesday. It just strikes Kara, after the fact, an ordinary, out of the ordinary detail.

She sits in Lena’s apartment when it happens, (on her cream-colored couch, which she’ll learn, eventually, that Lena threw out after) waiting for her to get ready before they head out to meet Alex and Kelly at the pub. A double date, her sister called it, laughing when Kara pointed out she and Lena aren’t  _ technically _ dating yet. “Well, whose fault is that?” she’d quipped, and laughed all the harder at Kara’s pinched face.

The buzzing starts just as Lena’s muffled voice drifts to her from the other side of the apartment. ( _ Almost ready _ \- she says, but Kara won’t remember it for weeks. It’ll drive her up the wall.)

Kara nods, and then, when she realizes how silly that is, opens her mouth to reply.

The words never make it out. 

The noise grows. Kara hears it hum all around her and stands, brows knitted in confusion as she tries to pinpoint the source. She flicks the lights on and off, inspects the TV. Nothing in her vicinity seems to be making the noise, yet it sounds all around.

When her eyes begin to water, she’s forced to give up. It’s too painful, like a swarm of metal wasps that crawl through her ears, to her skull, and corner all of her thoughts against her temples. 

“Lena?” she calls, uncertain. 

There’s no reply.

(How can Lena not be hearing it? It’s too loud,  _ too loud _ , too-)

The noise abruptly stops, and Kara slumps forward, almost crying in relief.

There’s a moment of silence, and then the world turns white. 

***********

On Krypton, Kara hadn’t been afraid of the dark. 

Mother and father saw her to bed whenever they could, and recorded bedtime stories for her when they were busy or would get home too late. Sometimes Aunt Astra stopped by instead, and left Kara wide-eyed with stories of the planets she had visited. 

(Until one day her visits stopped, without an explanation.  _ Astra is away _ , her mother said, strangely cagey.)

After Krypton died, everything changed. 

Alone inside a coffin made of metal - the same ironically meant to keep her alive - Kara had grown afraid. There were no stars inside the Phantom Zone (the Long Dark, she called it in her head), only darkness pressing against her eyes, and whether she kept them open or closed made no difference. 

It was easy to imagine the darkness seeping inside her, from her mouth into her lungs, and Kara’s young, impressionable mind ran away with that. 

Then she’d slept, and woke to find the darkness gone.

But the heart-wrecking fear never went away. 

The same fear seizes her now, as pain wakes her up. (Or maybe thirst.) 

Panic surges around Kara like the undertow of a rising tide, tugging and pulling at her even as her limbs feel cold and sluggish. Kara tries, but cannot move.

She tries, but can’t open her eyes.

Fear sours on her tongue, its sharp pins and needles underneath her skin. Kara welcomes it, warmly, just as she greets the searing flash of pain that laces down her spine when she attempts to move again. 

Anything to keep herself from thinking of the dark.

(Anything to keep herself from thinking of why her eyes don’t seem to work.)

***********

Kara dreams in shades of white. 

It’s too bright, glaring. Even in her sleep, it makes her squint. Blind when she’s briefly awake, blind when she’s asleep - Kara has no escape. 

***********

The first time the dream  _ shifts _ , Kara feels grateful. 

She stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and relief slowly drains away, supplanted by unease. It’s the cramped bathroom of her apartment, which soothes her nerves a little, yet it isn’t. The tilework - for example - is too expensive, the mirror cracked along one side. The rug is green, not blue, and where the shower box should be, Kara finds an antique bathtub, cast-iron claw feet and all. (She’s sure Eliza had one just like it, though, stored up in the attic.)

Perhaps this isn’t just  _ her  _ bathroom, rather a collage of all the bathrooms she’s ever been to in her life - but that’s absurd. 

Still, while the mish-mash of styles is odd, it isn’t as unsettling as her reflection in the mirror.

Kara glanced at it obliquely so far, from underneath her lashes, but now takes a breath and finally turns to the mirror. 

Under the flickering fluorescents, her skin glows sickly white, and the valleys of her face are like ravines. Waxen skin is pulled taut over her cheekbones, making her look hollowed from within, and deep, bruised shadows circle her eyes.

(Her eyes. There’s something wrong with them.)

She leans closer to the mirror, close enough that her breath fogs up its surface, and stares. Her eyes are…  _ weird _ . Particles of congealed silver/white cloud up her irises, float like lazy specks of dust across the black of her pupils when she blinks. Kara stares until her neck goes rigid, until her eyes start to fill with blood. It seeps in from the corners, flows across the white. Kara stares, horrified and fascinated. 

She stares until her eyes catch on fire. Until they burn as Krypton did, the flames sudden, coming from within her skull, and streaks of ash weep down her cheeks.

Kara screams and flees the bathroom - she’d flee her dreams, too, if she could, but now she can’t wake up. Her lungs have been pumped full of something sweet and cloying, and she can’t wake up. 

***********

The white dream - Kara decides - is much better. Safe.

Except it’s not white any longer. Whenever Kara drifts, whenever she isn’t really looking, color flickers at the edges of her vision. 

It’s there and then it’s gone, no matter how many times Kara risks giving herself whiplash to try and get a better look. 

Green. The green of mold, of rotten things. The greenish cast of corpses. The green of- 

(Her mind burrows away from the last thought like an animal on the brink of death.)

It’s green. It makes her sick.

***********

The transition from sleep to wakefulness is (mostly) seamless.

When it is, Kara barely has time to register her body before she’s thrown back into her dreams. When it’s not, she comes to with a gasp, aware of the pain lodged like so many splinters between muscle and skin.

Time loses all meaning, but ever so slowly, there’s change.

Consciousness lasts longer, stretches during which Kara does her best to piece together what has happened to her. On one hand, she’s glad, as she’d begun to suspect of being trapped in a loop. On the other, things become exponentially worse.

Even though she cannot see the damage, she’s entirely made of pain. She can move now (not open her eyes, but it’s still something), and the bruises she’s covered in smart deeply. So deeply, in fact, that Kara starts to wonder whether her organs are bruised, too, whether her bones cracked, brittle like glass.

Deprived of eyesight, it becomes scarily easy to think of the worst possible scenario.

One day, Kara allows herself to imagine what she must look like based on what her body’s telling her.

(Big mistake.)

She’s hot and slick with reeking sweat, but the heat that’s spread along her bones isn’t the inner fire of fever. It comes from below her, and for the first time since she’s been awake, Kara is aware that as yielding as the bedding beneath her broken body feels, there’s something else below it. Something hard and smooth – like glass? – and the heat that burns her back radiates from it.

The realization is accompanied by a familiar feeling through which Kara is able to circumstantiate her pain: it’s the sensation of her body knitting itself back together.

The broken parts of her are pushed back into place by a force that’s as unstoppable as gravity. Back in high school, Alex resented Kara's ability. She could hit her shin on the corner of a coffee table and the bruise was gone within an hour. Or slice her finger open at Thanksgiving, the first time Eliza let her carve the turkey, to find the skin perfectly unbroken the next day. When her sister grumbled about it, Kara smiled, but inside, she envied Alex her collection of small scars. Each of them was tied to a memory: the tree she’d climbed when she was six, the tumble she’d taken when she’d pedaled at full speed down Midvale’s steepest hill.

Kara’s body can break (it’s broken now), but under a yellow sun, it’s a clean slate after it heals. An unmarked map without a single point of reference - it doesn’t tell stories the way human bodies do.

This time, however, something’s different.

Even as her bones snap into place and her organs heal, the phantom pain of her injury lingers like an extra set of blankets. It’s suffocating, and Kara thrashes weakly under its weight.

Something nearby beeps, loud and urgent, and Kara’s mind is thrown back several days to the buzzing she had heard in Lena’s penthouse just before…before…

The panic that’s been a constant presence at the edges of her mind rushes forward in waves that seem to overtake her. Kara does her best to swim against the current, but she isn’t strong enough. She’s pulled under, she’s separated from herself, she’s lying on sweat-soaked sheets and standing at the foot of her own bed at the same time. Whatever’s happening to her is also happening to someone else, far away and far removed.

(She stares with her mind’s eye at the fragile, twisted thing tossing on the bed, and wonders how she could ever think it looked like her.)

(She’s Supergirl, not this...  _ weakling _ .)

Back on the bed, her double’s mouth falls open in a scream.

(But it’s hers, it’s  _ her _ , she feels the blood trickling through her teeth from the cuts in her lips.)

What tumbles out is a lone, frazzled word.

“Lena.” 

Someone shifts nearby, and moments later, a damp cloth is wiped across her mouth.

“I’m here.”

Kara falls back into the waiting dark.

***********

Next time, Kara wakes to splitting migraines and bleeding. 

From underneath the bandages tightly wrapped around her temples, pressed over her eyes. From the cuts she can now tell are clawing at her ribs. These are healing, as she discovers the first time she tries to push up on a trembling elbow, the scabs pulling miserably when she tenses with the effort. 

Sometimes the pain is so bad Kara thinks her organs are being digested by her body, which after that eats at her bones - until her skin is the last, fragile barrier keeping the blood and pulp within from rushing out. Some days it feels like her eyes have blood pooling in them, sloshing behind her eyelids, and the reason she sees black is that the liquid has congealed around her eyeballs. Trapped her retinas inside a hardened shell, in a more horrific version of the proverbial fly encased in amber. 

Then, a day comes when her throat isn’t too sore, and when the panic mounts inside her, she calls out for help, hoping someone is in the room. Unlike the first time, she gathered the courage to sit up, the pain of it so wrecking she’d fallen back on the bed. Howling for what had felt like an age, before people raced to her side and a sharp needle was pushed into her bicep. 

“Lena?” 

Kara isn’t sure why Lena’s is the name that jumps at her first when she thinks of calling for help. If there’s anybody sitting next to her right now, it would be Alex.

“Kara!” It  _ is  _ Lena, and her voice is heavy with relief. “You’re awake!” 

“What-” A bout of coughing shakes her chest, and the question ends in a choked wheeze.

“Wait,” Lena says, followed by the sound of water being poured into a glass. “Drink something first.” 

It takes some maneuvering, but eventually, they settle with Lena perched on the edge of the bed, one arm bracketed around Kara’s shoulders as she holds the water to her lips. 

She’s tempted to drink it all at once, and tries, but Lena pulls the glass away slightly, and the weight of her frown is like a cautionary hand shaped around Kara’s cheek. 

“Slowly,” she admonishes, waiting for Kara to nod before she puts the glass within her reach again. “If you choke, Alex will kill me.” 

“What happened?” Kara asks between one sip and the next. She does her best to do as Lena said, but the position is so awkward that about half the glass dribbles past her chin and onto the covers. “Where am I?” 

“One question at a time,” Lena laughs and sets the glass aside. Her cheerfulness sounds forced. “Do you think you can sit up if I prop you with some pillows? It might be more comfortable to talk that way.” 

“Please.” 

For days, Kara has been searching for a sign that she’s improving. It was hard when she was drifting and doped up, scarcely aware of the confines of her own skin, but she does find it now. 

Her ribs still hurt, but the bandages that wound around her chest have been removed, and when her fingers follow a ridge of bone, she meets unbroken flesh. The scabs must have fallen off, then. The rest of her feels better, too, the bruising superficial. It doesn’t hurt like black and deep purple anymore, but greenish-yellow. On the mend.

Except for her eyes. 

She’s about to raise a hand to her face, to the gauze taped over her eyes, when Lena grabs her hand, stopping her in her tracks. Her fingers feel so ragged against Lena’s, so weak.

“Don’t.” Lena’s thumb rubs calming circles on the inside of her wrist. “I’m sure Alex will take those off, too, in a few days, but for now it’s best your eyes stay covered.”

(Kara wants to ask her why, but has a hunch she wouldn’t get a straight answer.) 

“So, what happened?”

She settles back into the pillows Lena had piled behind her with a sigh. She’s unkempt and grimy with old sweat, but the pillowcases are creased, fresh from the laundry. It’s the best she’s felt in days - perhaps weeks - and she’ll take it.

_ Take comfort where you can,  _ her common sense whispers in Eliza’s voice,  _ you’re going to need it. _

(A sudden sense memory: Alex barking orders, shaky fingers pressed against her pulse. Someone - Lena? - crying softly in the background. Kara shoves it away - she can’t deal with it. Not right now.)

“There’s been… an accident.” The way Lena speaks is deliberate, like she is examining each word from every angle before she says it. 

(Like she’s trying to figure out how much she should say.) 

“You were hurt,” Lena concludes after a long pause, “but you’re getting better with every passing day. You’ll be alright soon.” 

“How bad?” 

Kara’s fists clench involuntarily around the edges of her blanket. She’s surprised at how  _ raw  _ her body still feels, how easy it is for it to tire. She’s been awake for maybe twenty minutes, and already, she’s keen to sleep through the rest of the day.

“Well, you scared us all there for a while, that’s for sure.” There’s a rustle of fabric, and Kara can almost picture Lena shaking her head. “But as I said, everything’s fine now.” 

Lena’s voice acquires a slight quiver on the last part. It teeters on the edge of breaking, then Lena draws a shaky breath and mends the crack in her facade. Kara doesn’t need to see her face to know it’s schooled to stillness - then again, very little makes it past the impassive mask Lena always wears, unless she wants it to. 

And, if her small misstep was not enough of an indication she’s lying, there’s Lena’s elevated heart beat, the way her breath hitches in her throat before she brings herself under control. 

Kara’s seen her lie plenty of times; to her mother and to Lex. To Andrea Rojas when she thought she could simply buy Lena out of CatCo and that she would take  _ that _ lying down. 

But Lena’s never lied to  _ her  _ before - Kara has yet to come across a creature, human or otherwise, of whom she cannot read the baseline biorhythms and Lena  _ knows  _ \- so why would she start now? 

She must have a good reason. Lena is nothing if not good. 

(Does she? 

Is she?) 

If her eyes weren’t already closed beneath the bandages, Kara would screw them shut now. She shies away from the stray thought like it was an adder trying to bite into her ankle, and as her fingers flex, tears a small portion of the blanket into ribbons. 

The sound of ripping fabric fills the space between them, but Lena doesn’t stop her, understanding Kara’s sudden need to have her hands full. Lena’s eyes on her are sad, full of regret.

Kara starts to shake her head, but the vicious throbbing in her eyes gives her pause. The darkness, this period of forced inactivity, is filling her with paranoia. It’ll be easy to descend into a spiral if she isn’t careful - she could drive herself insane. She almost had when she’d been trapped in the Phantom Zone.

Her bruises may be healing, but inside, Kara is fragile, her soul an open wound. For someone who’s grown accustomed to treat the very laws of nature like suggestions, being stuck sightless in bed is a hard pill to swallow. 

Funny how many things you take for granted until you’re made to go without. 

Even her strength is a pale ghost of what she’s used to. On the blanket, her fingers have stilled, not out of fear she’ll lay waste to the entire bedding, but because they ache down to her bones. 

Maybe Lena’s lying out of pity, and her wounds are worse than they want her to know. 

Except Lena would never do that to her: she’s trusted Kara with her darkest secrets, with all those Luthor instincts she’s trying so hard to mitigate. In turn, Kara had given her true identity and her planet’s history to safekeep. 

Alex was none too happy about  _ that _ .

Alex.

Unbeknownst to Lena, her eyes narrow. Something scratches at the inside of her eyelids - stitches, Kara thinks - and pain flashes from temple to temple, searing white. For one fleeting, glorious moment, it splits open the darkness, but there’s just more of it beyond. 

If Lena is lying to her, Alex must have told her to.

Aware that Lena’s watching her, Kara rips the rest of the blanket to shreds. 

**Author's Note:**

> join me[ on Tumblr](https://kendrene.tumblr.com/) for more gay nonsense!
> 
> [or find me on TWITTER](https://twitter.com/Kendrene17/)


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